Superman

I certainly had fun.

An entertaining reboot. A quirky, humanizing and socially conscious interpretation of a classic story retold for this generation.

This week's Superman installment is a decidedly intentional throwback that will likely please a generous segment of fans but disappoint many others due to its innocent nature and dramatic simplicity. [Full review in Spanish]

Superman is never bad, it's just too full to allow its best aspects to shine.

I could never quite reconcile Gunn's glibness and goofiness with his sadistic streak.

It is genuinely heartening to see a movie this massive refuse to shy away from how divided and broken our world is.

Sadly, there's almost zero magic in Gunn's Superman. Its special effects are more overbearing than special; the plot is all problem-solving and no poetry.

It is a restarting and a return to the sort of visual style of the Richard Donner's Superman from the '70s that we all loved.

In its modest way, this kind-spirited two-hour-long romp works as a corrective to the increasingly bloated and self-serious comic-book movie as we've come to know it.

Gunn delivers a fun, goofy, irreverent, and heartfelt motion picture overflowing with empathy and kindness.

Gunn has plenty on his mind but the movie doesn't congeal into a satisfying whole, leaving a mixed bag of comic book storytelling and modern commentary that isn't insightful or entertaining enough to get off the ground.

It makes you want to cheer. That's it, that's the secret ingredient that's been missing from so many superhero stories for so long.

Basically, Gunn is trying to tear something down and build it up at the same time, and all of that lavishly subsidized indecision becomes hard to take after a while.

With Superman, Gunn took on the formidable task of laying the foundation for a whole world. He not only pulled it off, he made it one that feels worth visiting, or if you're a superpowered visitor from another planet, risking everything to save.

...Gunn's big swings with this movie aren't merely about sticking it to anti-immigrant bigots, and it would be a mistake to overstate its seriousness. But like his golden age roots of truth and justice,...this Superman also stands for something bigger...

It's a shrewdly balanced film, a mix of flippant merriment and real dramatic stakes. Gunn would have a much harder time selling his new approach had he not cast smartly. Fortunately, he's found an appealing Kal-El/Clark in TV actor David Corenswet.

Mr. Gunn is determined to shake things up a lot, and does. Different, however, is not always good.

"Superman" is imbued with Gunn's rascally sensibility. His ebullience and enthusiasm for the material shine through this busy, dizzying film.

The alien is the most human of us all, and this Superman lives up to his name: He is a super man.

There's no grandeur and no wonder to Gunn's universe and, although there's much discussion of the defining quality of one's actions and choices, the film's superheroes seem thin, constrained, and undefined.